Elise Ansel: Flower of the Mountain

10 September - 30 October 2020

Rachel Ruysch

Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704

in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts

In 2019, I was invited to create an exhibition in conversation with masterpieces in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts museum. When I visited the museum, I was inspired by many of the paintings in the collection, but it was the encounter with two seminal works by female Old Masters, (or "Old Mistresses" as they were famously called by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker in Women, Art and Ideology), Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704 by Rachel Ruysch and Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1623-1625 by Artemisia Gentileschi, that proved truly transformative.

Having spent the last decade looking at art history through a female lens, countering or adding to a male perspective, overturning narratives of violence and voyeurism, rendering subjectivity in the feminine, I was energized by the opportunity to align myself with female artists from another time, another place; to draw strength and inspiration from their accomplishments, and to extend the conversation they began.

When I engaged with Ruysch’s painting , I realized it was literally crawling with details I wanted to paint. The meaning of the teeming insect life within Flowers in a Glass Vase is evocative and open to interpretation but the stunning beauty of the painting and the details within it, the richness of its voluptuous floral forms, is definite and undeniable. For the first time I began to make collages, moving details within the painting around and hybridizing sections of my own previous transcriptions with details of my paintings of the Ruysch in the collection at the DIA. Details within details, sometimes baroque, luscious, and opulent; sometimes spare and reductive. Trying to get at the truth at the heart of the painting. The idea of the profligate generosity of nature, fecund and fertile, teeming with life and death.

[Elise Ansel]
The encounter with Ruysch’s Flowers in a Glass Vase led to the creation of a number of oil studies on paper. In conversation with Carol Corey, Ansel and Corey realized this body of work could be expanded into a suite of works on paper that could be the focus of their own exhibition, and that this would be a wonderful show with which to launch Corey’s new venture in Kent, Connecticut. This allowed for further exploration and experimentation. Ansel began to examine other paintings by Ruysch as well as paintings by Willem Van Aelst, to whom Ruysch was apprenticed in 1679, at age fifteen, until his death in 1683. Ansel commenced examining the relevance of Dutch still lifes to the current moment: delving into details within details; cropping, rearranging and collaging; zooming in, pinching out; allowing the visual density of the source to reveal itself on deeper scrutiny.
oil study VI for Ruysch Flower Details, 2019

oil on paper, 12 x 18 in. (image)

ELISE ANSEL: FLOWER OF THE MOUNTAIN

"...THE SUN SHINES FOR YOU HE SAID THE DAY WE WERE LYING AMONG THE RHODODENDRONS ON HOWTH HEAD...I NEAR LOST MY BREATH YES HE SAID I WAS A FLOWER OF THE MOUNTAIN YES SO WE ARE FLOWERS ALL A WOMANS BODY YES THAT WAS ONE TRUE THING HE SAID IN HIS LIFE AND THE SUN SHINES FOR YOU TODAY YES..." [MOLLY BLOOM, ULYSSES]

These words are unequivocally optimistic; they embrace life. At the same time, they signal the presence not only of a subjective feminine voice or point of view but also of a necessary stylistic shift, the creation of a new and different type or use of language with which to communicate that point of view.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was the novel that first inspired my project of translating classical works into a contemporary language. Cropping and rearranging details from Dutch Golden Age floral still lifes manifests the transformative energy, the sparagmos, the tearing apart, weaving, unraveling, and re-weaving that is the heart of my activity. Selecting the exhibition title from the final Molly Bloom/Penelope chapter, a chapter that gives voice to the novel’s most conspicuously silent character, echoes and reenforces the idea of rendering subjectivity in the feminine in order to reclaim female agency, and give voice to the silent and the silenced. [Elise Ansel]
Works from the exhibition
VIDEO
Elise Ansel discusses her work from the Flower of the Mountain series and talks about her process of making works on paper.